失业保险资格和申领率随失业时长变化分析

By  Serdar Birinci ,  Kurt See ,  Gus Gerlach

KEY TAKEAWAYS

• To tap into unemployment insurance, unemployed workers must first be eligible and then decide whether to apply for benefits. An analysis of these eligibility and take-up rates shows these rates aren’t static but change as the duration of unemployment increases.
• Eligibility steadily declines during a long bout of unemployment. The main reason is benefits are available only for a limited period of time, typically six months in most states.
• Among those still eligible, take‑up rises as unemployment continues, reflecting growing financial need.
• Understanding the dynamics of eligibility and take-up rates is important to consider when devising optimal policy for unemployment insurance.

Unemployment insurance (UI) is an important source of income support for workers who lose their jobs. Yet receiving UI benefits is not automatic. A worker must first be eligible for benefits and then apply to “take up” UI benefits. Among those who are eligible, some do not collect their benefits.

Calculating Eligibility and Take-up Rates

In a previous On the Economy post, we documented rules on UI eligibility across U.S. states over three decades. In our working paper, we use these rules together with individual-level data from the Census Bureau’s Survey of Income and Program Participation (SIPP) to estimate an unemployed individual’s UI eligibility status. In particular, the SIPP provides information on monthly employment, earnings, the reason for unemployment and state of residence. We use this information and construct individual-level outcomes required to assign UI eligibility. This way, we can distinguish unemployed workers who are UI-ineligible from those who are eligible but choose not to collect benefits.

We define unemployed individuals as UI-eligible for a given spell if their pre-job-loss outcomes in the SIPP satisfy their states’ eligibility rules at that time; all other individuals not meeting these criteria are deemed UI-ineligible. We then classify UI-eligible individuals as taking up benefits in a given month if they report non-zero UI income, and as not taking up benefits if they report none.

Based on these definitions, we calculate two key statistics: the fraction of eligible unemployed ( i.e., the eligibility rate, or Eligible Unemployed Unemployed ) and the fraction who take up among the UI-eligible ( i.e., the take-up rate, or UI Recipients Eligible Unemployed ) .

In this blog post, we explain how eligibility and take-up rates change over the course of an unemployment spell. The results reveal two striking patterns: The share of unemployed workers who are eligible for UI declines over the course of an unemployment spell, while the share of eligible workers who take up benefits rises.

Eligibility Declines as Unemployment Duration Increases

The first figure shows the share of unemployed workers who are eligible for UI benefits at different points during an unemployment spell.

Among all unemployed workers, the eligibility rate is about 58% in the first month of unemployment. By the ninth month, it falls to approximately 38%.

Why does eligibility decline over the course of unemployment? One important reason is that UI benefits are available for only a limited period of time. In most states, regular UI benefits are typically available for up to about six months, although the maximum duration varies across states and can change over time. Once an individual’s benefits are exhausted, that person is no longer eligible to continue receiving benefits under the regular UI program.

The decline in eligibility is therefore an important reminder that unemployment duration matters when evaluating the reach of the UI system. Looking only at eligibility at the beginning of an unemployment spell provides an incomplete picture of how many unemployed workers remain covered as time passes.

The figure also separately follows workers who remain unemployed for at least nine months. For this group — referred to as “Unemployed: Stayers” — eligibility declines even more sharply later in the unemployment spell (from 72% to 40%, over the same period), consistent with benefit exhaustion driving this decline. Nevertheless, a substantial share of these long-term unemployed workers remain eligible even after nine months for two reasons. First, some states have longer maximum UI durations than six months. Second, some unemployed individuals wait more than three months to begin receiving UI and thus have not yet exhausted benefits at nine months.

Take-up Rises over the Unemployment Spell

Eligibility is only one step in receiving UI benefits. Among workers who are eligible, not everyone applies for benefits. The next figure shows the UI take-up rate at different durations of unemployment.

The pattern moves in the opposite direction from eligibility; instead of gradually falling, the take-up rate rises before slipping. Among all eligible unemployed workers, the take-up rate starts at about 58% in the first month of unemployment and rises to approximately 75% by the sixth month. It then plateaus for several months before declining slightly. Among stayers, the take-up rate rises more sharply because those who are predisposed to remain unemployed longer tend to have lower wealth, leading to a greater reliance on UI.

As an unemployment spell continues, these two patterns unfold together: The share of unemployed workers who remain eligible for UI shrinks, while the share of eligible workers who receive benefits grows.

Why These Dynamics Matter

The opposite movements in eligibility and take-up rates show that the population of unemployed workers is not static. The characteristics of UI recipients and the extent of UI coverage change over the course of an unemployment spell.

These dynamics also illustrate why analyzing the UI system using a single average eligibility or take-up rate can miss an important part of the picture. At the beginning of unemployment, UI reaches one group of workers at a particular rate. Several months later, both the share of unemployed workers who remain eligible and the share of eligible workers receiving benefits look substantially different.

In our working paper, we show that accounting for these empirical patterns drastically changes how the government should design UI policy to improve the well-being of unemployed individuals.